An early October batch of links replaced by a personal essay about my synagogue closing

Earlier this year, I sent to paying subscribers a first crack at an essay, which I continued to work on, placed, and then at last published last week in The Lehrhaus. I’m glad I wrote it and sent it when I did this past Summer to paying subscribers, if only to award myself the permission and to present myself with the confidence to keep shaping it to get to where it should be for wider distribution.

I hope you’ll have a read of it today, a suitable season for its contents to publish and thus distribute. I have scheduled this email blast to go out in the hours leading up to Yom Kippur services, at nightfall. I hope this message provides support and strength to people near and far, believers or non-believers.

This year, more than amid the same cycles I’ve experienced, I’ve done good writing, outside of the regular audience I reach and keep. I have found tremendous momentum in my ongoing thinking about where I belong - and with whom - despite some setbacks that have taken hold in the interim. To write is to know ahead of time that you have something to express.

At Kol Nidre tonight, at a service I won’t be attending myself, a local rabbi will speak about some of the themes of what I presented to him when we sat down earlier this Summer. It’s a testament to my hard work this past year that he was able to listen to what I had to say, so much so that what he took in he’s determined to share with others about lay leadership from within. I look to continue to participate in these cycles in the year that follows. These conversations and subsequent correspondence is what powers me to get through the harder moments.

We can’t stop setbacks and stumbles from occurring, but we can each better prepare ourselves for such inevitabilities, that when they do run their course they not knock us off our prescribed path. That we fortify ourselves to preserve the best of what each individually can bring to the collective whole.

Last year at Kol Nidre services, I watched from near the back of the room the rabbi walk around the men’s section shaking hands with nearly everyone, notably minus the then synagogue president whom he felt unappreciated by, snubbed by. I recognized in that moment that our synagogue - despite whatever efforts would go into maintaining our dedicated space despite all that lost momentum and long-ago, left-behind camaraderie of ‘We’re all in this together’ - wouldn’t make it to the next High Holy Days. I committed at that instant to making sure that I would leave that place better than I found it.

So I wrote.

And so it was written.